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Just finished some sprites for a new character!

This is, for all intents and purposes, a shaky and rather paranoid old babushka called Maria who is found wandering the city, and whom the spotter is forced to ask for directions towards the glorious Lenin statue. His task is somewhat obstructed by her nervousness, lack of focus and the fact that she has no clue what Lenin looks like. In case you are wondering about the reason for Marias behavior:

Spoiler

Marias skittishness may have something to do with the tiny fact that he's neither old nor a woman but in fact a german deserter who disguised himself as an old woman and now desperately tries to keep up the lie. Maria is his real name though.

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Depending on the player the spotter may or may not be oblivious to Marias true identity.

This character is meant to look a bit like a baglady, with an ill-fitting outfit cobbled together from worn and patched old rags likely found lying on the street, and trembling and shaking with shifty eyes. While the spotter certainly won't enjoy talking to Maria, I do hope the player will.

Looks beautiful and terrifying at the same time!
The main antagonist of the game?

The airplane part looks amazing, it will be most interesting to see how it will turn out in the completed game. Best of luck!

Lol, this sounds like some cracking good satire!  I have tried like 12 games recently and realized I can't even play war or fighting games anymore that glorify or turn war/violence into a party.  So this game looks right up my alley!

The animation is excellent and thorough as hell too!

Why thank you so much!
When I first got the the idea of making a darkly humorous cartoon game about the second world war, I was very unsure whether it was a good idea.
They do say that comedy is the hardest genre to write after all, and I have a hard time coming up with good games to compare it with when it comes to the tone I'm aiming for, since most war-games are power fantasies glorifying war, and the few anti-war games that are out there tend to go with either a somber and serious approach or drown the player in sentimentality, pulling their heartstrings as if their life depended on it. But the problem for me is that the action war-games also do this, but here the audience get to see destruction and horror (Bonus point if a cute girl/child/dog is killed off just to make the badass hero angry!) in order to rile up the audience along with the protagonist and make them want to take revenge and make it fun to kill the enemies.

So instead of showing the horrors of war, I wanted to depict the pointlessness of war, pompous propaganda against a grey and slightly gross backdrop, idiot commanders, arbitrary orders and Kafkaesque absurdities.
And maybe a bit of slapstick humor.
This little game may not be on par with The Good Soldier Š vejk, but I do hope it will get at least a few good laughs as well as provoking some thoughts.

The completed background is indeed awesome. I like it
I see the script hilarity is escalating

Great to hear!

Here is a new image of the spotter, which is from a scene where he finds himself in the midst of gunfire and, upon hearing the thunderous sounds, and knowing that he is a soldier in one of the greatest wars in human history, an epic battle between fascist totalitarianism and communist autocracy and a war which saw many great heroes sacrifice their lives for their homeland, he reacts quickly and takes an immediate measure without a single hesitation.

Well, he isn't terribly interested in posthumous medals I suppose...

The new screenshots looks absolutely gorgeous!

The script is hilarious!

If you haven't mentioned that the background wasn't complete I wouldn't have guessed. It looks like the old cartoons style

Great to hear that you find it funny!
Anyway, here is a new screenshot with the completed background, you can compare it with the screenshot above.

I've been doing my best to make it look nice and interesting...
well, as nice and interesting as a decayed eastern-bloc industrial town can be.

Really cool surrender pose you got there. I think maybe a slightly shivering movement of the arms/hands would give it a bit more tense.

Thanks, great that you like it, Kumpel! I have been thinking of adding some hand movement to the animation myself.
I suppose that I got the idea for this scene because many action movies and games have a scene where the hero is captured by the monologue holding villain, but the hero just comes with a cocky comeback and/or punches the bad guy in the face, so I wanted to try and go in the complete opposite direction and have a tense scene where the protagonist is genuinely scared, but not entirely without a bit of humor though.

Now, I know this doesn't look very good, but do not worry. The background in this screenshot is not in it's finished state and will look different in the completed game.
Any thoughts?

Today Svetlana Alexievich recieved the Nobel prize in litterature! (Saw it all on TV! Though she didn't wear a ballgown, since she stated that it would feel wrong to wear jewels and finery when her writing is about the horrors of dictatorship and war)
Her book, War's Unwomanly Face has been a great source of facts and inspiration to me, and portrayed aspects of war that usually are omitted from games, usually not very brave or heroic aspects. One such aspect is the pointlessness, but also absurd, silly situations bordering farce, something which also gets omitted from many anti-war stories.

For this game I wanted to have a comedic tone, since I think that the silliness is just as important for the anti-war message as the horror. Countless war propaganda have asked soldiers to shed their blood for their country, but not a single one have asked them to soil their pants for their country.

Here is a new screenshot:

This shows one of the many ways the player can die if they are careless. Nihilistic maybe, but not all deaths can be meaningful and heroic sacrifices that leaves the mortally injured hero alive just long enough to hold a dramatic monologue.

It looks great, and the the story of the poor family was very touching. It's great to see a game that deals with complex social issues rather than boil them down to black and white morality choices, and shows poor people as well, people and not slot machines where you can dispense valuables in exchange for good karma points. I'm certain this game will be great!

I can't imagine having to hurt this guy in the game please tell me he won't get hurt in the game.

It's heartwarming to see someone care about the spotter's well-being (His commanders certainly doesn't!), but since the game takes place in a war he is certainly at risk and it is possible for him to die, as seen in the GIF's in the critic's lounge thread (http://www.adventuregamestudio.co.uk/forums/index.php?topic=52409.0). The spotter (unlike the sniper) isn't thrilled about being dragged into a war and is mostly just trying to survive. He certainly isn't going to go on a Rambo-rampage (If he were, I'd be working on a FPS, not with AGS! )
But do not worry, if you wish to keep him safe it will be possible for a keen player to finish the game without killing him even once!

I made some new sprites for two of the enemies the protagonists encounter, trying to strike a good balance between silly and scary while giving also them distinct and disparate personalities:

And since I already got the steam up, I made a new animation for the spotter as well:

As you can see, he's in a bit of a tight spot and weather he gets out or not, well, that will depend on the player...

As of lately my work pace with this project have varied, and I doubt I will be able to complete it this autumn (seeing that November is almost at an end), but on a positive note I estimate that I'm now about halfway done and have put the most difficult parts behind me, so the release will hopefully be around before too long.

Always funny how plans change while working on something.
It was planned as a haunting, eerie piano piece but turned out to become something entirely different.

I'd say the music gives off more of a "yay let's go on a fantasy quest" vibe, but it's awesome all the same and judging from what I've seen from this game so far it seems to fit like a glove.

Congrats on the release! Downloading the game as I'm writing.

It looks great, though it looks a bit weird that her face moves back and forth but her hair on top of her head doesn't. But otherwise it looks awesome!

It's been a while, but I have finally come up with a new character design that I wanted to share and hear some opinions about.

This is what appears to be a very jittery, paranoid old lady which the spotter has to ask for directions.

Spoiler

The overstrung paranoia may have something to do with the fact that the old "lady" is a German deserter trying to disguise himself. The spotter may or may not notice this.

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I suppose I took some inspiration from this scene in monty python and the holy grail: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JvKIWjnEPNY
So, what do you think?

I absolutely loved Jaqueline white: Bad trouble in the Red Desert, and hopefully this will be just as great,
it's always nice to see a new adventure with swashbuckling and a pulpy feel.
Looks like Indy might get some serious competition!

It took a while, but I just figured it out and was able to solve it! Now the character moves to the right position before doing the interaction, and I think that all the big bugs have been solved.
Thank you both for your time and patience!

sweet. Though I'd give his legs one more inbetween frame for the bottom one.

I agree, it looks a bit abrupt. But otherwise it looks awesome, the blue light bathing the scene looks stunning!

If you look at Khris's code, you can use it to fill in the gaps in what I gave you (or you can just use his directly, just changing some of the coordinate values), and so within the constraints you mention (blocking walks, teleportations to outside of the teleportation regions), that ought to... work.

I've looked at Khris's code, and I must say I greatly appreciate your effort, Khris , but when I tried using it on a new project the problem was still there.

I just want to make clear that even if you fully understand how GetWalkableAreaAt() works, you're still a long way from a working solution.

I'm just barely beginning to understand what it means, and I'm starting to feel that this is currently to complicated for me as I'm just a beginner, so I have been thinking of coming up with an easier solution altogether and perhaps save these functions for a later project when I have more experience.

I considered just disabling the hotspots when the player steps onto the region, and enable them when they step onto the other region, so that the player can't interact with a hotspot in the wrong area,
but I would want the player to have some clue that the hotspot could be interacted with.
What I'm thinking is that when the player is in the first walkable area, they can interact with the hotspot, but when they step onto the teleporting region, they will trigger a change in the hotspot script so that the player character instead just says something along the line of "That's too far away, I must get closer" when you click on the hotspot, and vice versa when the player steps onto the other teleporting region. Is there a command for changing the script of a hotspot like this?